I'm a language grad and a student language teacher, and in my spare time I learn languages. I have a special interest in minority languages and as a former IT professional I am particularly interested in where human and computer meet.

31 May 2013

Before it's sudden closure, the
Fundamentals of Online Education reintroduced me to two terms I'd
previously encountered in passing, but never really thought too much about (I
probably wasn't actively teaching at the time, so didn't really have
much of a framework of reference to evaluate them against): the
flipped classroom and backwards
design.

The
flipped classroom is a fairly simple idea, and its theoretical merits
should be immediately obvious. I believe it arose in higher
education, so let's look at it in that context. Every year, a
lecturer delivers the same lectures (more or less) to a room of
students. Lectures are not generally highly participatory,
particularly early on in degree schemes (during my 1st
and 2nd
year in Edinburgh University, we were well into the 3 figures even in
my smallest lecture group). But teaching time is a precious
resource, and very limited. Why are we wasting the time of some of
the most intelligent people in the world by having them say the same
thing year in, year out, rather than freeing them up to get extra
time with the students, dealing with problems? And why do we, as
students, end up doing most of our practice exercises at home, where
there's no-one to help us when we go wrong or get confused?

So the goal of the
flipped classroom is to overturn the orthodoxy. Let's make the
lectures available as video for study beforehand, and then when
students come into class, the teacher's dedicated to what they
individually need.

There are several
reasons that this might not be such a good thing in practice for many
subjects, but that's not what I'm interested in today. No, today, I
just want to show that this is not a new idea.

What I've read
about the flipped classroom seems to be coming more out of science
faculties than arts, which is not surprising to anyone who had
friends that studied literature at uni. Us science students used to
mock the arts students for their light workload, because they had
fewer classes on their timetable than us, but we saw that
backbreaking pile of books they were carrying and thought “there
but for the grace of God go I.” A literature student may have to
read a long, heavy novel every week, and they have to read it before
class. Their timetable is as empty as it is because they have very
few lectures, and instead have more seminars where they discuss what
they've read.

The same is
true for a lot of arts degrees. You may be expected to read a major
treatise by one of the great thinkers before going to a Philosophy
class, and if you're studying classics, you might even be expected to
read it in the original! So it is wrong to suggest it's a new idea, simply because we now attempt to apply it to science classes.

Does it matter that
it's not a new idea? In and of itself, no. However, in practical
terms, if you don't acknowledge that someone is already doing it, you
deny yourself the opportunity to go and ask the experts how it should
be done!

Anyone who wants to
“flip” their classroom should instead by asking how science can
be made more like the arts. They should be asking arts lecturers
what works and what doesn't; what can be passed to the student to do
beforehand, and what has to be kept for the classroom. They should
be auditing arts courses and experiencing for themselves the
phenomenon they wish to replicate.

The other idea was
backwards design.

Backwards design is the idea of starting by setting out what you want the students to
know at the end of the course; then by deciding how you will verify
how they have learned it; and finally you work out how to teach it.

For
this to be presented as new or in anyway unusual is pretty hard to
swallow, because people do this all the time,
it's the absolute norm in schooling. A national committee writes a
national curriculum. The exam board plans an exam format to test the
criteria set out in the curriculum. Finally, the teachers and
textbook writers are given the curriculum and sample exams and write
their lessons.

Now, the
traditional line is that teachers should be teaching to the syllabus,
not the exam, but in reality, most teachers know that the exam is the
primary goal for the students and they do indeed “teach to test”.

I said presenting
it as something new was hard to swallow, but in fact I actually found
it more frightening than anything. Were there people who weren't
actually doing this?!?

...and then I
realised: there are, and as a language teacher, I'm one of them.

It's been a source
of frustration to me ever since I got into languages almost a decade
ago that language teaching seems to have institutionally rejected the
notion of a “syllabus”. There is no list of what a student
should know at any level. We're asked to “learn/teach the
language” rather than “learning/teaching the test”.

It's a laudable
goal, but it leaves the learner or teacher, and particularly the
self-teacher, in a rather bewildering forest of choices. Where to
start? What next? Can I afford the time to cover this language
point properly, or do I need to make do with an incomplete
understanding and move on to something else?

For a long time I
was convinced, though, that Cambridge (for example) had to have some
kind of syllabus internally; a list of words, expressions and
language points that examiners are allowed to include at every level,
but now I'm beginning to wonder. Do they give their examiners the
same advice they give us, the mere teachers that only have to prepare
the students to sit and pass an exam based on unpredictable language:
to use their “judgement” to pick something “appropriate to
their level”?

Because
to be blunt, institutions like Cambridge are completely failing in
their goals. A responsible teacher will always “teach the test”,
and if you don't give us the language we need to teach, then we have
no choice but to devote more of our time to exam techniques, and we
end up spending less
time teaching language.

So I'm very much in
favour of the goals of backwards design, but I'm worried that by
naming it and treating it as something new and different, it will
come up against resistance to “change”, even though it is not, in
fact, real “change” – it's a defence of the longest standing
traditions in education against a combination of flawed teaching
ideologies and sloppy practice.

So these philosophies have created two obstacles for themselves by pretending to be new: they discount all the existing evidence, and they turn off people who might otherwise be convinced by the past experience of their colleagues.

04 May 2013

I've just been nosing around on Coursera looking for interesting courses to take. I'd read recently that they'd signed up several new course providers, including the first of their providers that aren't accredited universities.

My first reaction was to doubt the value of non-university courses, but one of these suppliers has brought with them something that was lacking in the previous material: course progression. Some of the universities have been joining Coursera just because it's the in thing, and others have been using it as an advert for their distance education programmes. But it's never in a university's interest to offer an entire programme for free.

Enter the Commonwealth Education Trust, a charity whose mission is to provide teacher training at primary and secondary level to improve children's education in developing countries in the Commonwealth.

Their whole goal is to provide complete teacher training for free, so teaming up with Coursera reduces their costs and extends their reach and their 8 module teacher training programme is a win for everyone involved.

Their main target is at practicing teachers who haven't had any formal training, and I'm intending to follow it as a supplement to my CELTA certificate, which I always felt was slightly insufficient as teacher training. The CET programme is estimated at between 180 and 280 hours in total, covering 46 weeks of activities spread over about 16 months (the first sitting of module 1 starts this August, and the first sitting of the final module starts next November). In total, that's actually comparable to the amount of time you're expected to spend on a 4 week intensive CELTA course, so I suppose I'm hoping there's a difference due to the quality of content, and the fact that this is general teaching with no specific language focus (I've always felt that language teaching suffers due to a belief that "language is different", so the lessons from general teaching are sometimes ignored). Also, the pacing of the course should theoretically help long-term retention: my CELTA felt heavily "crammed", with no proper consolidation of learning.

On top of this, the Trust are also offering some kind of certification for people who complete all 8 modules:

On the satisfactory completion of each course you will receive a statement of accomplishment related to the course. On the completion of all the courses you may contact the Commonwealth Education Trust to request a statement of accomplishment related to the overall program.

I'm not aware of whether the Trust is part of any recognised accreditation scheme, but it's certainly likely to be looked on favourably if you're applying for voluntary teaching work in a Commonwealth country.

I'll be taking it this year (or at the very least "starting it" -- I've got a poor record with free online courses, not having completed a single one yet), so I'll let you know how I get on. There's a second sitting starting next January.

03 May 2013

The OU's Open Education MOOC is officially over, and unofficially it's winding down as people continue to finish off. This means I'll probably be shifting the focus of this blog back to its traditional ground of languages and language learning, but I just saw an interesting post via the Open Education blog aggregator, with an ExtraNormal video describing something of the MOOC experience, and I thought I'd share it.